Saturday, March 03, 2012

Who are you?
I am Eidolon. Or fulldamage, on Livejournal. If you want to know more, go ahead and put your google-fu to the test. I'm not hard to stalk, but I'm not really here to write up an autobiography.

What is this place?
This is Ehaema. It is a blog which I have wedged into the intertubes at an odd angle. It crossposts into Livejournal as well.

What does it mean?
Ehaema is an onomatopoeia for throat-clearing, as well as a name for Mother Twilight, a dusk spirit in Estonian mythology. Not that I'm an Estonian scholar; mostly it is just a word I like.

What is it?
This is a microfiction project. On each weekday, I will post a new short piece. Weekends I will take a break, though there might be news or admin posts such as this one. For LJ-users, I'll try to keep things short or use lj-cuts so as not to blow up your stream.

Why skip weekends?
It's funny - you'd think that I would rather take it easy on workdays, and be creative on weekends? But not so much. I find that on weekdays, a shot of creativity and flexing my imagination muscle helps to keep me feel excited and engaged when I might otherwise be bored. And on days off, I don't like making myself choose between well-earned relaxing time and creative time, because then it's like either choice is a loss.

Why are you doing this?
It is practice. Microfiction is a little bite-sized chunk of work - the effort is really minimal, allowing me to fit it anywhere into my schedule, and it gives me an excuse to write every single day, to improve every single day, and to have a motivating deadline to meet and beat every single day. As with any other skill, I can only improve through regular practice, and I want to improve. I often find myself daunted or trapped in critique and self-doubt with other stories I've started. Here, I want to remove my compulsion to analyze and reconstruct the plot ad infinitum. This is just wordplay, exercise. It might, in time, become a story of a sort - but my priority is just to keep up the effort.

Forever?
I want to keep this up for a year. We'll see how that goes. But if you're moved to do so, you can help me out by commenting, reacting, or otherwise giving me incentive to always hit that deadline. And though I can't go so far as to promise you a story in the traditional sense, I will at the least try and keep things interesting.

Are you going to work on some of your older stories here?
No. It will all be new work, written specifically for this project. I may write ahead a little bit to create a buffer, because there are times when the day really is too busy or I'm traveling.

Are you a supernatural creature or a monster?
Shhhh. Hush.

Everything I've read here so far is terrible and I do not like you, as a person.
That's... not actually a question.

Can you write something for me?
It's the sort of thing I'm known to do. Leave a comment or message, and we'll parley.

You are already supposed to be writing something for me! Why are you wasting your time on these instead?
I got this. Don't make it weird.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

What is this rhythm?Not in the sky above, if it is really sky.Below then. Beneath our feet, in the bones of this world, supporting us, holding us up against the unreachable above. We stand upon the surface of a dark heart. Each beat may take a second, an hour, a minute, a day, a year, a decade, a century, an aeon - we cannot know. But it beats. and with each beat, time gathers itself. Coiled, sinuous, waiting. We must move. For with time, there always follows an ending.

Stalkbox

Introduction of Sorts

I have had many names, in different times and places. They're not hard to discover; look in the Stalkbox if you're curious.

For the past year, I've been writing a novel in public. And I've finished!

You can read it, if you want, using the Archive widget below. You don't necessarily have to read it in order, but it begins on Leap Day of 2012 and moves forward from there. It ends in March 2013.

I really enjoyed that process; I might do it again, as soon as I've finished off a couple of smaller projects that are coming due. I do intend to do a revision pass and edit this into something more manuscript-like in the very near future. But for now I'm leaving this first draft up as it is, for people to enjoy, and for me to remember how it began.

For now, I'll place the occasional thought or musing here once or twice a week, just to keep the cobwebs from gathering.

In the bar below, you can click on the RSS symbol to add this blog to your feeds, or click on Message in a Bottle to receive an email version, if that works better for you. If there's a blog tool that you think should be down there, by all means let me know.

Thanks for visiting this place, outside of the other places. Spend as much time as you like. We'll see you again... won't we?